Enhancement Shaman's in 5.3 [Discussion/Questions]

• Stormblast now does 450% weapon damage, up from 375%.
• Stormstrike now does 450% weapon damage, up from 375%.
• Lava Lash now does 300% weapon damage, up from 250%.
• Mental Quickness now grants 65% of your attack power to spell power, up from 55%.

Looking at all of this, I feel like I am going to be enjoying 5.3 a lot. But that being said, do you think Enhancement Shamans deserve it? What do you think of them currently in both PvE and PvP environments?

Personally, I think they are a little lackluster in both currently. I believe they bring a lot of utility with totems and off-healing, but I do feel that their damage is very 'spiky' and drops significantly during the entirety of a fight.

Sure, it is possible to pull a lot of damage as Enhancement but it does seem to drop off for about 3 minutes. I can't speak for everyone though. With an 8 and a 10 second CD on both of our main attack it does feel as if these buffs are trying to compensate for the CD's we have of them.

I do feel as if reducing the CD's on both of the spells would be a nice option also. Dropping Lava Lash to an 8 or 9 second CD and Stormstrike to a 7 second CD would allow for a bit more sustain damage, but with the new 2 piece set we have it could prove that Stormstrike would be making our damage increase by a significant amount.

Let's see how this would work out in theory.

Lava Lash 100k average damage (For this example)

Assuming you were to use it on CD every time for a 10-minute fight, it would deal 100k(6 x 10), resulting in 6,000,000 Damage as an overall (if it weren't to crit).

Lava Lash 120k average damage (5.3 Changes)

Assuming you were to use it on CD every time for a 10-minute fight, it would deal 120k(6 x 10), resulting in 7,200,000 Damage as an overall (if it weren't to crit).

Lava Lash 100k average damage (With an 8 Second CD)

Assuming you were to use it on CD every time for a 10-minute fight, it would deal 100k(7.5 x 10), resulting in 7,500,000 damage as an overall (if it weren't to crit).

Lava Lash 100k average damage (With a 9 Second CD)

Now because of how 9 goes into 60 and 600 seconds, I am going to round it down from 66.66 recurring to 66.

Assuming you were to use it on CD every time for a 10-minute fight, it would deal 100k x 66, resulting in 6,600,000 damage as an overall (if it weren't to crit).

And of course, the same for Stormstrike.

Stormstrike 50k average damage and 25k OH damage (For this example)

Assuming you were to use it on CD every time for a 10-minute fight, it would deal 50k(7.5 x 10) + 25k(7.5 x 10), resulting in 3,750,000 Main Hand damage and 1,875,000 Off hand damage resulting in 5,625,000 damage as an overall.

Stormstrike 60k average damage and 30k OH damage (5.3 changes)

Assuming you were to use it on CD every time for a 10-minute fight, it would deal 60k(7.5 x 10) + 30k(7.5 x 10), resulting in 4,500,000 Main Hand damage and 2,250,000 Off hand damage, resulting in 6,750,000 damage as an overall.

Stormstrike 50k average damage and 25k OH damage (With a 7 second CD)

Because of how 7 divides into both 60 and 600 seconds, I am rounding down to 85 from 85.7.

Assuming you were to use it on CD every time for a 10-minute fight, it would deal 50k(8.5 x 10) + 25k(8.5 x 10), resulting in 4,250,000 Main Hand damage and 2,125,000 Off hand damage resulting in 6,375,000 damage as an overall.

So, here is my question.. Would you rather have slightly reduced CD's to make our rotation smoother as an overall, or do you think it would make it worse for us? Or do you believe that the extra damage would be better?

I feel that with reduced CD's, our damage wouldn't be so spikey in PvE and it would help Enhancement to provide a more consistent pressure in PvP by DPS'ing more frequently. But, I am not a pro player and this is why am I posting it here and that's why I want you to talk about this, discuss it and help expand upon it.

As an overall, I'd like the reduced CD to 9 seconds on Lava Lash and the damage increase on Stormstrike to keep it a bit more balanced out. If we were to have the reduced CD on Stormstrike, it would allow us for 3 Stormblasts every time we had ascendance up.

Thank you for reading.

Disclaimer, I'm not perfect. Maths may be incorrect and the ideas you may not agree with, this is what I think would be nice for us Enhancement Shamans. I also am not a professional player, high-end PvP'er. I just write things. I'll add more shortly.

They tried move enhancement away from being GCD locked at the beggining of Cata, although it's not really been very sucessful due to maximising damage via hardcasting lighting bolt at low maelstrom stacks. Shortening the Cd's will not really benefit the class as a whole, the gaps in your rotation can still be put to use with other abilitys like healing stream totem and the downtime between abilitys also have an overall possitive effect on your damage when you have to target switch or move from certain abilitys. When the class had no gaps in the rotation as soon as you're out of melee range it starts having a real detrimental effect on your overall damage. This was one of the main concern as to why it was changed to begin with.

I understand why this gets brought up every now and then but it's just going to have a negative impact for both PvE and PvP

I would keep the CDs the same but find a way to let us use our SS or LL more often, like reset CD's of abilities or proc a free SS/LL.....similar to how Lava Surge for Elem works. Other melee are resource dependent and their abilities usually have no CD or short CD's, and by pooling resources they can choose to put out more burst in a small window by chaining abilities back to back at the cost of more resources. Enhance can't do that since we are limited by our CD's and no way to pool resources so we can chain abilities....we need a way to bypass our set CD's or a resource to pool, I have a few ideas to try and improve this:

-A cheap copy but imitate Lava Surge for Enhance by having Flame Shock ticks give a chance to proc a free LL (reset the CD so you can use it more often)
-A ~30sec CD ability that will reset the CD on LL plus will buff your next LL to act like it has 5 Searing Flames (5SF) stacks......this is an on demand burst CD that is short so can be used often enough and also allows you to use LL back to back for timed burst.
-For "pooling resources", let MW5 stack up to 10 or 2 full MW charges so after you get your first MW5 it converts into a different MW buff and MW5 stacks again from 0-5. This gives you 2 instant casts that you can store up and use for burst damage w/ LB, or EB+LB, or burst healing w/ 2xHS.....or 1 LB and 1 HS. Much more flexibility.

For PVP though I agree that the bigger issue is survivability. They should make the new LS glyph a passive buff for Elem and Enh, and Enhance could prob use another defensive CD.... Elem got SR after the totem nerf but Enhance got nothing. Instead of a brand new CD they could just add some defensive buffs to an existing CD like SWG which is rarely used by Enhance other then some offheals, so since its already used defensively add some buffs to it like 15-20% dmg reduction while active and it puts you in an etheral state which causes attacks and spells to have a 50% chance of missing.

I also think the totem silence nerf should be reverted, most of our totems should have 10%HP, and glyphs should be looked at with some made baseline since Enhance has too much bloat for glyphs with many high priority or mandatory level glyphs...... LS obviously, plus Imp GW (since Enh lacks a solid gap closer and this is the closest we have)......those two would be enough to free up 2 glyph slots that we can customize while 1 glyph slot will still almost always be filled with Healing Storm.

Honestly I think it would be best if we got a buff to our weapon/physical damage instead of just just buffing SS and LL. because that way our auto-attack would also be buffed as well as our two Melee attacks. Sustain damage is all about dealing good damage without relying too much on Cd's. So instead of arguing about SS and LL or reduceing the CD. There is a simple solution to the problem and thats is to buff the Physical and spell damage done.

In regards to LL, I think that the weapon imbued should proc seraring flame to that you would have to focus on your Searing totem while ST should become a 1Min Cd that deals more damage and has an 5-yard AoE.

Power never corrupts but it brings out ones true self. Think about that for a moment.

Honestly I think it would be best if we got a buff to our weapon/physical damage instead of just just buffing SS and LL. because that way our auto-attack would also be buffed as well as our two Melee attacks. Sustain damage is all about dealing good damage without relying too much on Cd's. So instead of arguing about SS and LL or reduceing the CD. There is a simple solution to the problem and thats is to buff the Physical and spell damage done.

In regards to LL, I think that the weapon imbued should proc seraring flame to that you would have to focus on your Searing totem while ST should become a 1Min Cd that deals more damage and has an 5-yard AoE.

Larger buffs to active abilities are much better than auto attack buffs. They're both increases to sustained damage, the difference is that LL and SS don't suffer as much when you cant have 100% uptime on the boss. Thats a big problem we had in Cata and ToT is full of bosses where you are constantly peeled off the boss.

-A cheap copy but imitate Lava Surge for Enhance by having Flame Shock ticks give a chance to proc a free LL (reset the CD so you can use it more often)

Maybe add a glyph (I know we've got a lot of them already) that adds Frost Shock's snare (and root if talented into Frozen Power) to Flame and Earth Shock.
This would be huge for ele pvp I imagine, but also nice for more damage for enh(and less damage taken through ES debuff).
It would also allow for a bigger use out of UF, since most seem to run WF/FB now anyway, and the snare out of FrS would make the UE:FB one stronger more often.
Since Flame Shock with your idea would become as important for enh in pvp as it already is for ele, this would be a pretty much mandatory glyph I guess (which isn't the optimum sollution I am aware, so GW, CPT and HS should be baseline to make space).

Originally Posted by Angoth

I'm sorry that Blizzard won't just gift wrap awesome in a cup and let you drink your fill.